Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

Pinay Lifestyle interviewed Ms. Adee Caluag on the beginnings of Agahan, an all-day breakfast place in Makati which opened in December 2011. Adee talks about how Agahan arose from her own needs and realizations, and about how some items in the menu came from her childhood experiences.

I am now officially an entrepreneur. While many of the employed have romanticized ideas of what entrepreneurs’ lives, I’ve now seen first-hand how it is. Here’s how my lifestyle has changed:

1. I put in more work hours.

If you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t mean you dilly-dally for most of the day. It’s quite the opposite: there are many things to be done when building a business, and since I’m just starting out, most of that work goes to me. Don’t start a business just because you want to work less—it won’t happen.

2. My time is flexible.

While I do work more, I get to choose when I will. That means I get to visit friends when they’re in the hospital, run errands at the mall right when it opens, transact at the bank outside the lunch hour, work out at the gym when there are fewer people, etc. I guess it’s my little reward for having to work more hours.

3. I get more of the morning sun.

Something tells me I used to be deprived of vitamin D. I’d usually be in the office between 8:00 and 10:00 am, so I wouldn’t get a chance to get vitamin D the natural way. But now, since I occasionally walk around from 8:00-9:00 am, I enjoy the smiling sun.

4. I get heat exhaustion once in a while.

The sun is fine in the morning but it gets bad after that. I’m rather sensitive to heat, so I really avoid going out at midday. But there’s no one else to do the running. I do go out for errands at noon when I have to, and most of the time, that means the heat will get to me. I try to battle the heat by drinking cold juices but in the Philippines, you could only do so much.

5. Wasting time has very real consequences.

When you’re employed, you could get away with being idle once in a while. But when you’re building a business, everything rests on you, so time wasted really means less income. I can’t afford to waste a single minute of my time because it means something in the plan won’t materialize.

6. Money really matters now, and that’s a lot of stress.

I used to take the flow of money for granted because I received a paycheck every two weeks. Now, I have to make the business work, and that means I have to make the income model work. That’s a great deal of pressure. But it really comes with the territory, and I knew that this would happen even before I made the leap to entrepreneurship. I’ve had to come up with ways to sustain myself (e.g. part-time work) so that the money stress won’t kill me.

And last but not least…

7. I get to build my business the way I want to, without having to explain or prove anything to anyone!

When you’re employed, you’d have to have nearly everything approved. We builders by temperament can’t build anything without having to explain so much to our superiors. Since I’m running on minuscule funds from my own pocket and from an angel investor (i.e. my ever-so-supporting mom), I don’t owe any explanations to my bosses or shareholders. Building is simply faster this way—and heaven for people like me! When I go to work, I just go straight to work. I don’t make as many proposals and presentations as I used to 😉